Dear Twitter: if you don't want to use a patent to beat other companies into submission, grant an irrevocable license for anyone to use it for FreeAsInBeer in perpetuity. No one would be able to prevent you from using the idea protected by the patent (defense + 1) and you wouldn't be able to prevent others from using it (offense - 1).
Tell you what, figure out a way to temporarily fund the government cybercrime squad using general funds. After 2 years on the job, ask the people who would pay if they support a tax to keep the cybercrime squad around.
If they want my vote, I'm going to need to see some impressive, worthwhile results.
Dear iPhone insurer: Your customers want to upgrade to the latest model each year, so just build a 'free' annual upgrade into your price. Instead of taking a hammer to their phones, your customers will send you their *working* phones (which you can resell) and you'll deal in bigger volume, perhaps enjoying some added economies of scale.
There's a really simple solution for the publishers: become the preferred buyer and seller of their own used games. It would offer them another opportunity to interact with their customers, sell them another game, see how long they are playing, and ask them about what they liked and didn't like. Oh, and they'll earn the revenue instead of Gamestop or Amazon.
My favorite 'AI experience' was the first time I encountered the marines in the original Half-Life single-player game. They chattered and moved as a team, they reacted to my grenades, they reacted to being hurt i.e. "man down!", "fall back!". I suspect, however, that level designers deserve the greater part of the credit for making those NPCs look smart (and fun to fight).
A game's systems work together to create an experience--in order for one to shine the others must be well designed, crafted, and integrated. Sometimes fixing a camera, tuning NPC stats, or adding some scripted chatter will do a lot more for the perceived intelligence of the opponent than a more sophisticated AI algorithm.
I think it's easy to lose sight of the ultimate goal (making a fun game) when coding AI, because, let's face it, making brilliant AI is a sexier challenge than paying attention to all the little details the make a level play well. Ironically, one of the problems in game AI these days is how to make the AI a little dumber (but not a lot dumber). It's easy to make a chess AI that will beat most people, but getting one's ass handed to one 30 times in a row is tiring to say the least. On the other hand, an AI that can be beaten handily isn't much fun either.
I want to vote with my feet, er eyeballs. What are some good alternatives to Google Search and Google Maps that regardless of their motto, actually DON'T do evil? What are some really good search engines that have refused to censor their results in China and not just because they are too small for China to have bothered to ask them to?
Right now all of our wireless devices work on the "shout as loud as you can so people can hear you principle." When we get too many devices trying to work in the same space, it's like putting a bunch of people on opposite sides of the room and asking them to shout across the room to speak to each other. This works fine when one or two conversations are going, but it doesn't scale very well.
Mesh networks offer the possability of having each node pass a note to the node closest to them in the direction of the node they are trying to reach. They only have to speak loud enough for that closest node to hear, making meshes a lot more scalable. Like passing notes in high school rather than shouting across the room and getting the teacher pissed off at you.:)
I suspect that as wireless devices become more popular we'll need something like mesh networks to make more efficient use of the spectrum. In fact, in a manner similar to Bittorrent and Freenet, the more people that participate in a mesh network, the more resiliant and speedy the whole network is.
It's like being forced to watch a sick dog go through death throws. Forget PeopleSoft, Oracle should buy SCO and put *them* out of their misery. Heck, Redhat's worth $2.4B and SCO's only worth $240M. Please!!!!!!!
We don't need newer and more creative ways to sidestep our poorly conceived IP laws, we need new laws.
I for one would be grateful if places with clout, like MIT, would spend their resources advocating for better policy rather than engaging in legal contortions. If MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Princeton, Yale, NYU, etc. threw *serious* support behind good policy (like the Eldred act, IMHO), the RIAA would find it much harder to have their way with congress.
Admittedly, uniting these institutions of intellectual debate is much easier said than done, but they are uniquely equipped to put forth balanced proposals that address a broader social agenda than would ever emerge from an industry lobby. We could really use someone with the clout, resources, intelligence and neutrality of MIT to help write (and right) the rules of the game that are fair to *all* the stakeholders, not just the RIAA.
What we are finding is that leaving the fox (the RIAA) to guard the hen-house (IP policy) is great for the fox and bad for everyone else.
StorageReview runs a lot more tests on their extensive collection of hard drives than this gentleman had the chance to. They used to have a great article up about the performance differences between SCSI and ATA. In summary, if you have two hard drives with the same stats, SCSI will (on average) enjoy the speed advantage only when you are reading and writing to/from more than one hard drive on the same controller at a time.
However, since most SCSI hard drives have more cache, higher spin speeds, and lower seek times, they tend to be faster by virtue of *those* attributes.
In time I expect SATA RAID will give us all the best of both worlds. Cheaper, more reliable, better performance, and greater capacity per $ doesn't look to be that far off.
Would backing up to an offsite FTP account or two provide the protection you need? You could host it yourself or have an ISP with its own backups host it for extra protection. It may even be straighforward to automate depending on your setup. You can use GPG to encrypt the backups if you are concerned for their privacy in transit or at the backup storage site.
Slashdot Mirror
Saying negative things about people is rarely in your interest.
Dear Twitter: if you don't want to use a patent to beat other companies into submission, grant an irrevocable license for anyone to use it for FreeAsInBeer in perpetuity. No one would be able to prevent you from using the idea protected by the patent (defense + 1) and you wouldn't be able to prevent others from using it (offense - 1).
Fast Company wrote about IGN looking in non-traditional places for excellent programmers: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/160/ign-self-taught-coders. There are probably others like them.
In Soviet Russia YOU are the IP.
Tell you what, figure out a way to temporarily fund the government cybercrime squad using general funds. After 2 years on the job, ask the people who would pay if they support a tax to keep the cybercrime squad around.
If they want my vote, I'm going to need to see some impressive, worthwhile results.
Dear iPhone insurer: Your customers want to upgrade to the latest model each year, so just build a 'free' annual upgrade into your price. Instead of taking a hammer to their phones, your customers will send you their *working* phones (which you can resell) and you'll deal in bigger volume, perhaps enjoying some added economies of scale.
There's a really simple solution for the publishers: become the preferred buyer and seller of their own used games. It would offer them another opportunity to interact with their customers, sell them another game, see how long they are playing, and ask them about what they liked and didn't like. Oh, and they'll earn the revenue instead of Gamestop or Amazon.
A game's systems work together to create an experience--in order for one to shine the others must be well designed, crafted, and integrated. Sometimes fixing a camera, tuning NPC stats, or adding some scripted chatter will do a lot more for the perceived intelligence of the opponent than a more sophisticated AI algorithm.
I think it's easy to lose sight of the ultimate goal (making a fun game) when coding AI, because, let's face it, making brilliant AI is a sexier challenge than paying attention to all the little details the make a level play well. Ironically, one of the problems in game AI these days is how to make the AI a little dumber (but not a lot dumber). It's easy to make a chess AI that will beat most people, but getting one's ass handed to one 30 times in a row is tiring to say the least. On the other hand, an AI that can be beaten handily isn't much fun either.
I want to vote with my feet, er eyeballs. What are some good alternatives to Google Search and Google Maps that regardless of their motto, actually DON'T do evil? What are some really good search engines that have refused to censor their results in China and not just because they are too small for China to have bothered to ask them to?
I ran Kerry's election-year-politican-English through Babelfish's election-year-politican-English ->normal-English converter and what he said was: No.
Carr's article is just flame bait people...
Mesh networks offer the possability of having each node pass a note to the node closest to them in the direction of the node they are trying to reach. They only have to speak loud enough for that closest node to hear, making meshes a lot more scalable. Like passing notes in high school rather than shouting across the room and getting the teacher pissed off at you. :)
I suspect that as wireless devices become more popular we'll need something like mesh networks to make more efficient use of the spectrum. In fact, in a manner similar to Bittorrent and Freenet, the more people that participate in a mesh network, the more resiliant and speedy the whole network is.
sb
It's like being forced to watch a sick dog go through death throws. Forget PeopleSoft, Oracle should buy SCO and put *them* out of their misery. Heck, Redhat's worth $2.4B and SCO's only worth $240M. Please!!!!!!!
I for one would be grateful if places with clout, like MIT, would spend their resources advocating for better policy rather than engaging in legal contortions. If MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Princeton, Yale, NYU, etc. threw *serious* support behind good policy (like the Eldred act, IMHO), the RIAA would find it much harder to have their way with congress. Admittedly, uniting these institutions of intellectual debate is much easier said than done, but they are uniquely equipped to put forth balanced proposals that address a broader social agenda than would ever emerge from an industry lobby. We could really use someone with the clout, resources, intelligence and neutrality of MIT to help write (and right) the rules of the game that are fair to *all* the stakeholders, not just the RIAA.
What we are finding is that leaving the fox (the RIAA) to guard the hen-house (IP policy) is great for the fox and bad for everyone else.
However, since most SCSI hard drives have more cache, higher spin speeds, and lower seek times, they tend to be faster by virtue of *those* attributes. In time I expect SATA RAID will give us all the best of both worlds. Cheaper, more reliable, better performance, and greater capacity per $ doesn't look to be that far off.
Would backing up to an offsite FTP account or two provide the protection you need? You could host it yourself or have an ISP with its own backups host it for extra protection. It may even be straighforward to automate depending on your setup. You can use GPG to encrypt the backups if you are concerned for their privacy in transit or at the backup storage site.